Cate Hall is an author, speaker, and former CEO of the Astera Institute, a multibillion-dollar private foundation. She's a former Supreme Court attorney and was the #1-ranked female poker player in the world. Her book You Can Just Do Things is published by Harper Business. She writes weekly at her Substack, Useful Fictions.

You Can Just Do Things is about agency — the learnable capacity to see and act on all the degrees of freedom life offers. It draws on Cate's journey through law, professional poker, addiction and recovery, startup founding, and nonprofit leadership to show that the "rules" most people follow aren't rules at all. It's a practical guide to building a higher-agency life: ceasing to wait for permission, crossing the cringe minefield, and learning to act before you feel ready.

Cate speaks on agency, decision-making under uncertainty, burnout, and building high-agency teams. Her talks draw on her experience across law, poker, startups, and nonprofit leadership. She offers keynotes for corporate audiences and conferences on topics including the invisible rules that hold people back, what poker teaches about risk, why willpower is overrated, and how to build a company culture where people take initiative. For booking inquiries, visit catehall.com.

Cate's TED talk, "A Practical Guide to Taking Control of Your Life," is about personal agency. She shares her journey from addiction to leading a multibillion-dollar foundation and offers tactical advice for increasing your ability to see and act on life's hidden degrees of freedom. The talk has been viewed nearly one million times.

Agency is the capacity to both see and act on all the degrees of freedom that life offers. It has two components: noticing that you have more options than you think, and actually taking action on them. Cate argues that agency is not an inherent personality trait — it's a skill that can be deliberately cultivated, and her book and talks focus on exactly how to do that.

"How to Be More Agentic" is Cate's original essay on personal agency, published on her Substack Useful Fictions in January 2024. It offers concrete, tactical advice for increasing agency: asking for things that feel unreasonable, finding real edges others overlook, crossing the "moat of low status," and assuming anything can be learned. The essay helped bring the concept of agency into mainstream conversation and laid the groundwork for You Can Just Do Things.

Cate writes regularly at Useful Fictions on Substack, covering agency, decision-making, burnout, authenticity, and related topics. Her most popular essays include "Maybe You’re Not Actually Trying," "How to Be More Agentic," "How to Increase Your Surface Area for Luck," and "How to Instantly Be Better at Things." She has also been featured in Asterisk Magazine, The Generalist, Not Boring, and other publications.